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Can We Afford It?


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CAN WE AFFORD IT?

 

A PERSONAL ENQUIRY

 

Living Our Lives on Credit.

 

It is no use waiting until you can afford things, these days. By the time you have saved up for the new car, Jones has had his for years: all that time you have been using the bus or asking him for a lift. When at last you could pay cash for the refrigerator, Mrs. Brown would have been living for years on pre-packed frozen foods. And when the television set finally came your way, you would have been ‘humiliated for month after month by having invitations to the Robinsons’ which you could not repay.

 

Nearly all of us have fallen, therefore, into the way of life where we accept our luxuries and necessities on credit: even the most careful among us usually buys his house on a long-term mortgage if it is to be bought at all; and the rest live in rented accommodation, where others may or may not be paying a portion of our expenses out of their rates.

 

A lot of this we cannot help. Much of it we don’t want to help. The fact that we pay much more for it in the end either escapes us, or we shrug our shoulders and forget it: we can read our newspapers with both eyes on the “no deposit credit terms” advertisements, and never on the dull little panels which offer other people 7—9% for their money so that it can be lent to us at still higher rates of interest!

 

Mr. Micawber up to date.

 

But that is not all. Earning your bread and butter is a dull business. If you put a few pence each week into a Pool, and turn a blind eye to the fact that the government takes 30% and the promoters take their generous share, then the rest may one day turn your way in the shape of something like £100,000: and all this for no productive work at all. You simply exercise your wits, or let your fancy run riot, or put your marks where the mood takes you; and if it takes you and your family at least an evening every week to do it, at least no one is standing over you with a stop-watch and assessing piece-rates. You are whiling away your own time. And if you invest anything from £1 in a government-sponsored scheme, one day the smiling postman of the hoardings may knock at the door and deliver you a warrant for £1,000, at the whim of a monstrous electronic machine at Lytham-St. Annes-on-Sea.

 

All the time, therefore, you can be waiting for “something to turn up.” For some people it does; for most people it does not. Common sense tells us that for every person who gets £1, 000 in one year, there must be 249 who do not, at a 4% rate on the £100 they have put by.

 

There used to be people (perhaps there still are) who mock at the idea of “pie in the sky when you die,” which is what Christianity is often supposed to teach. But now it is “pie in the post if you try” for millions of people who don’t trouble about the after-life any more. Religion is certainly no longer, in our lands, the “dope of the masses,” as it used to be called: we have worked out for ourselves new dopes, and the most terrifying thing about them is that they keep us from thinking about the most important things in life.

 

Can it be, perhaps, that cars and refrigerators and television are not the most important things? Could it not still be true that a man might gain £100,000 or even £1,000, or neither of them for all his trying, and yet lose his own soul? And if this could be true, can we afford to live as so many of us are doing?

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Time is running out.

 

Time is running out, for each of us and for all of us. If you read this at fifteen years of age, the days might still seem long: you might still be counting the time until you are independent and your own master. If you read it at forty-five you might be wondering how you could ever have been so silly as to want the years to fly. Now, perhaps, you would give a lot to stop them, but time is moving ever faster. If you read it at sixty you might already be wondering which year it really is, not because you are suffering from loss of memory, but because time gallops so fast that a year is scarcely greeted before you are bidding it goodbye. Really doing anything with your life seems nearly impossible, because by the time you have reached a decision—if you do— it is usually already too late. You have very likely got into a groove—a greasy groove that goes ever more sharply downwards, and you have no brakes. And underneath, as the groove becomes vertical and you fall headlong into eternity is—What?

 

That applies to all of us. For all of us, also, are such things as nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles. There is no security for the human race any more. Every disarmament conference that ever is held is so much whistling in the dark in the face of the doom that awaits our race if some unscrupulous government or person breaks its word and presses that fatal button. And we are not a race which keeps its word. The history of civilisation is littered with broken treaties. It becomes a question as to whether your own death (or mine) by natural causes or whatever it might be, will come before or after a race catastrophe. With every year that passes, we become likelier candidates for the catastrophe. But, in either case, we are trifling with our destiny if we ignore both, and behave as though life was made up entirely of our painted luxuries and our petty gamblings.

 

What are we here for?

 

This is the crux of the matter. If we are here for any purpose at all, it is for something better than killing time until we die. Our Creator ought to have some say in the matter. As the Bible puts it, “Thou hast created all things, and for Thy pleasure they are and were created” (The Book of Revelation 4:11). Since God peopled the world with men and women, it was for something better than having them all wiped out by a destruction of their own making. To quote the Bible again, “God Himself, that formed the earth and made it; He hath established it. He created it not in vain, He formed it to be inhabited.” (Isaiah 45:18).

 

God will see to it that the earth becomes the kind of place He meant it to be, in His own good time. He has worked steadily to this end ever since sin set all our race on the downward track to the grave. For that is where sin did set our feet: “Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Genesis 3:19). Eternal death awaits those who choose a living death by leaving God out of their lives. If the matter were left there, there would be nothing to live for except dying, and God would have created man for nothing except final extinction. And we have shown that the last, at least, cannot be true of everyone, however many may choose that way. Our Lord Jesus Christ warned us how many would choose it, when He said, “Strait is the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it; wide is the gate and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat.” (Matthew 7:13-14). That broad way is our slippery road, and we do not need to exert ourselves to get into it. That is where we shall find ourselves if we do nothing at all about it. But it is different with the narrow way. There we shall not come unless God shows us the route, and unless we follow it while there is time.

 

“Seek ye the Lord while He may be found. Call ye upon Him while He is near. Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts, and let him return unto the Lord, and He will have mercy upon him and to our God for He will abundantly pardon” (Isaiah 55:6-7).

 

Can we afford not to?

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God is ruling in the world.

 

All unseen by most of us, God is leading His purpose forward. Men in their pride think of the world as their own, but if we take one look back and another look around, we shall see that this is not so. Why did the ancient empires crumble, and others take their place? The Bible says that it is because God raised them up to do His will, and discarded them when others had to take up the task. Daniel, chapter 2, draws a huge image to represent human kingdoms: the golden head is Babylon, the chest beneath is Persia, the belly and thighs are Greece, and the legs are Rome. God predicted, while Babylon was still mighty, that all these others would come: and they did come. He predicted that, after the fall of Rome—though He did not say how long afterwards—His own Kingdom would be set upon the earth. “In the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed... It shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms and it shall stand for ever.” (Daniel 2:44).

 

Before Babylon rose, God chose a particular nation to keep alive His will. Abraham was brought out of idolatry (Genesis 12:1). His descendants were rescued from slavery (The Book of Exodus). Palestine was theirs until Babylon rooted up their kingdom. Some were back in Palestine again at the time of the birth of Jesus Christ, and until the Romans expelled them once more (Luke 21:5-24). And now they are going back again in great numbers: something like as many Jews have gone into Israel within the last forty years, as went there under Joshua forty years after Moses led them out of Egypt. God has shown the truth of His promise that Israel should never be destroyed (Jeremiah 30:11). Soon He will show how true it is that, when Israel is restored to Palestine, the time of the world’s redemption has come. As Peter put it to the Jews themselves: “Repent ye therefore and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, when the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord, and He shall send Jesus Christ... whom the heavens must receive until the ‘times of restitution of all things, which God hath spoken by the mouth of all His holy prophets since the world began.’” (Acts of the Apostles, 3:19-20).

 

Jesus Christ is the Ruler.

 

We do not often think of Jesus Christ in this light. We think of Him as someone crucified, risen from the dead, and now in heaven. If we think of meeting Him at all, an idea has been in our minds, very often from childhood up, that we shall go to heaven to join Him when we die.

 

But this is not what the Bible says, and it would not be the solution of the world’s problems if it were. “God shall send Jesus Christ,” said Peter. “He shall come whose right it is,” said the prophet Ezekiel to the last king of Judah (Ezekiel 21:27). “Ye shall see the Son of man... coming in the clouds of heaven,” said King Jesus Himself (Mark 14:62).

 

This return of the Lord Jesus to the earth will not be easy for the world to accept. According to the words of David (Psalm 2), the nations of the world will rebel against Him when He comes, and, according to Revelation 19, they will make war against Him and will have to be overcome. As a result, the first effect of Jesus’s second coming will be terror and dismay among the nations: “The Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven,... in flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ” (2 Thessalonians 1:7-8).

 

Who will be the rebels when the Lord Jesus comes back? They will certainly not be His true disciples, who have been waiting and longing for His coming: but they might well include those who have for so long sold themselves to the empty pleasures of this life, that they are not prepared to meet Him, and are ashamed to confess their ways before Him. According to the Bible, the nations of the world, by and large, will be in this position. Unless we take active steps in the other direction, there is no reason to suppose that we will be any better placed than any one else.

 

Can we afford it? Is it safe, or wise, or right, to neglect our opportunity of being able to greet the Lord Jesus with pleasure when He comes?

 

“But we may be dead when He comes”.

 

Of course we may. Very many people have died already. What has happened to them? Or what is going to?

 

What has happened is that they have died. And death is death. They are sleeping in the dust of the earth, as Daniel puts it (12:2). Amongst those dead people will be some who have lived faithfully as disciples of Jesus Christ. And there will, unhappily, be some who have wilfully refused to serve Him faithfully. When Daniel says, “Many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake,” he means these two groups of people. The faithful disciples come out of their graves to “everlasting life”; the rebellious men and women come out to “shame and everlasting contempt.” The former experience will be wonderful beyond compare, putting all the tawdry pleasures of this life into the shade. The latter, even though it ends in final extinction will be dreadful beyond contemplation. “There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

 

If you are dead when Jesus comes back, you may be among the latter if you have refused His invitation. This is a terrible danger to face. If you are living then, there is no promise that you will escape when He subdues the nations, and no promise that He will not judge you as a rebel if you do. This prospect stares us in the face if we neglect to do something about it now.

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Can we afford it?

 

Of course, you may by this time be asking: Can we afford the other thing? It is all very well talking about the waste of our lives in buying and selling and eating and drinking, in spending and gambling. But at least these things are easy to do: easy, and for a while exciting too.

 

Religion, on the other hand, is a thing for dull dogs. It means black-bound Bibles and dim churches. It means long faces and a scowling refusal to do the things which other people enjoy. You would, perhaps, rather go to hell1 your own way than to go to heaven2 in a way which makes this life miserable?

 

What is the price?

 

First, it isn’t true that you lose happiness by becoming Christian. On the contrary, you can face present and future with confidence, and enjoy life with thankfulness, which the grumblers of this world—and how people do grumble!— cannot.

 

Second, there isn’t any price. The thing is a free gift. This life pays its wages: “for the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). God offers something we haven’t deserved:

 

“The gift of God is eternal life, through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

 

Third, there are conditions, of course. To mention them briefly: we must admit that we are sinners, doomed to the grave. We can’t expect God to give us what we don’t need. We must look at the selfless life of Jesus Christ and really want something like it for ourselves, so that we can be God’s servants. (Don’t jib, by the way, at the idea of being a servant. We can’t help being servants: either we serve sin and get death as wages, or else we serve God and get immortality, beyond our deserts, as reward). We must look at the way Jesus died, and say, “So that’s the way to be free from sin!” We must think of our old, vain hopes and sins as being crucified with Christ, and let all the past be buried out of sight in baptism. This baptism means letting ourselves be covered up in water, just as Jesus did Himself (Matthew 3:15), and rising again to start a new life. And we must wait with patient continuance in well-doing until Jesus comes back. It won’t matter if we have to wait part of the time in the grave, for He will never forget anyone whom He has written in His Book of Life (Revelation 3:5), and living and dead will stand before His face to receive their reward.

 

Not expensive, is it? Nothing is wasted, either. The treasure is permanent: neither moth nor rust doth corrupt.

 

Can you afford this? The Bible calls it a “pearl without price,” and so it is. And it is freely offered to those who will accept it.

_______

 

1 This part is all right. (“Hell” in the Bible means, usually, the grave, where nearly everybody goes, and where a great many people will stay. “Hell fire,” on the other hand, means the dreadful destruction at the Day of Judgement which is reserved for the particularly rebellious against the law of God. Either way it is a poor choice to make.

 

2 Here there is a mistake. The Bible doesn’t talk about people going to heaven. “Pie in the sky” isn’t merely the dope of the masses. It is simply false teaching. The Bible talks about Jesus coming back to give immortality to His faithful servants on the earth. Put this point right, then, and the question becomes: “Would you rather go to your graves without any hope of immortality, at the price of pleasure in this, or pay the cost now, and come out of the grave to delightful immortality on the earth when Jesus returns?”

_______

 

A. D. Norris

 

For further information on this subject please write to:

 

C.A.L.S.

3 Regent Street

Birmingham 1

 

for a free copy of the booklet “The Only Way of Salvation”

 

Issued by the Christadelphian Auxiliary Lecturing Society

 

The Kirklees Printing Co. Ltd., Bethel Street, Brighouse, Yorks.

 

CanWeAfordIt_Norris.pdf

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